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Our future, our universe, and other weighty topics

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Computer
experts have long struggled to achieve artificial intelligence (AI),
computers or robots with human-like intelligence. There have been
many errors in predictions about when artificial intelligence would
appear. Page 12 of the paper here
gives a graph showing that 8 experts predicted that computers would
have human level intelligence by about the year 2000, and that 8
other experts predicted that computers would have human level
intelligence by the year 2020 (something incredibly unlikely to
happen in the next few years).

Some
experts continue to make dubious predictions about artificial
intelligence. Some have become what we may call AI alarmists. An AI
alarmist is someone who warns us that computers or robots are
going to get so smart that a great disaster will occur. Some say that
a large fraction of the population will become out of work, as
computers or robots take the jobs of bankers, physicians, lawyers,
and software developers. Other AI alarmists predict something worse:
that machines will become so smart that they take over the planet.

Such
alarmists often say, “Maybe if we're lucky they'll keep us as
pets.” High-tech luminary Elon Musk has said, “A.I. is a
fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization, and I don’t
think people fully appreciate that.” Stephen Hawking has made similar comments.

According
to the computationalism theory of the human mind, the mind is like a
computer, so one day we will be able to develop computers that
produce outputs just like human consciousness. Such a theory is
assumed by most AI alarmists. Such theorists usually don't tell us
that they are advancing the computationalism theory of the human
mind. They usually just pronounce the dubious ideas of such a theory
as if such ideas were self-evident.

But
the computationalism theory of the human mind is not valid. The
human mind is not like a computer, and the brain has nothing like these seven things that a computer uses to store and retrieve data. The human mind has facets such as
conscious experience and understanding, which have never been
produced to any degree by a computer.

Let
us look into what happens when computers compute. The following
equation covers most of the types of computation that occur.

By
digital inputs or digital outputs I mean anything at all that can be
represented digitally, by a sequence of binary numbers. Here are some
of the things that we know can be represented digitally, and which
modern computers do use as digital inputs or digital outputs:

Any
number

Any
set of characters or words

Images

Videos

Databases

Any
text can be digitally represented by means of things such as the
ASCII system that allows you to represent particular characters as
particular numbers. While we don't normally think of an image as
digital, it can be represented digitally as a series of pixels or
picture elements. For example, a photograph might consist of 1
million pixels, which each can be represented by a number
representing a particular shade of color. So the image can be
digitally represented by a million such numbers. A video can also be
representing digitally, since the video can be represented as a
series of images, each of which can be digitally represented.

But
there are some things that we can never hope to produce as digital
outputs. The first is real conceptual understanding. By
understanding I don't mean “how-to” type understanding, but the
high-level conscious understanding of some abstract truth or concept.
We can imagine no possible way to produce a digital output that would
equal a real conceptual understanding of something.

But,
you may ask, doesn't that smart computer Watson already understand
something – the game of chess? No, it doesn't. Watson merely can
produce a digital output corresponding to a good move to make as the
next move in a chess game. Watson has zero conceptual understanding
of the game of chess itself, and has zero understanding of the
abstract concept of a game. The only way you can understand the
abstract concept of a game (or the abstract concept of leisure) is if
you have been a human being (or something like a human), and played a
game yourself.

A digital output
must always boil down to a series of 1's and 0's. Can we imagine a
series of 1's and 0's that would equal a real understanding of an
abstract concept such as health, matter, life or world peace? No, we
cannot.

AI
alarmism is based on the idea that future computers will be able to
produce conceptual understanding as an output. They won't, because
real understanding of abstract concepts is not a possible digital
output, and digital computers will only be able to produce digital
outputs. Computers or robots lacking conceptual understanding will
neither be able to take over the world nor even ably perform any of
the more intellectually demanding jobs requiring the repeated
application of general intelligence.

But
why do computers sometimes seem smart? Because by programming
software and putting that into a computer, a computer can act as a
repository of human logic. But the logic used by the computer is not
coming from the computer, but from some human who programmed the
computer. The process of encoding human logic and transferring human
logic to a computer is relatively slow and laborious, only allowing
the simulation of very limited types of expertise. There seems to be
no hope that clever humans will ever be able to create some kind of
general intelligence program that thinks and analyzes in the
general-purpose way that humans do.

Faced
with such reasoning, an AI alarmist may reply with clever reasoning like
this:

But
we know that the brain produces understanding, and the brain is a
material thing. Once we understand the exact material factors
involved in how the brain produces understanding, we need merely ramp
up such physical processes in a robot or a computer, multiplying
such processes many-fold; and then you'll have something that greatly exceeds us in
intelligence and understanding.

I
deny that we know any such thing as what is stated in the first
sentence of this argument. Nature never told us that our thoughts and
ideas are coming from our brains. The idea that the understanding of
the human mind is produced by the brain is an unproven dogma –
something very often asserted, but never proven. Such a dogma is
certainly not proven by brain imaging studies, which merely show very
unimpressive differences in blood flow to different parts of the
brain, typically only 1 or 2 percent (see here for the flaws of brain
imaging studies).

Below
are eight reasons for doubting that human understanding is merely a
product of the brain.

No
one has any real understanding of how neurons or any other brain
parts could produce consciousness, ideas or understanding.

As
documented by physician John Lorber and others, and as discussed here, there are numerous
cases in the medical literature of people who maintained normal or
almost normal consciousness and understanding, even though very
large parts of their brains were destroyed or ruined by disease or
injury.

The
mammal dissection experiments carried out over many years by Karl
Lashley showed surprisingly high mental functionality when large
portions of animal brains were removed, including large fractions of
the cortex.

As argued here, the human mind has quite a few fundamental traits that we cannot explain as being caused by natural selection, because they don't provide survival value; and this undermines the prospects of explaining our minds as some material effect.

The
human mind occasionally displays psychic powers (as demonstrated
here and here) that cannot be accounted for through brain
activity.

During
near-death-experiences there have been numerous cases of people who
reported floating out of their bodies during cardiac arrest, and
often correctly reported details during a time when they should have
been unconscious.

Claims
that understanding comes from the brain (or more specifically the
brain cortex) are in conflict with tests showing very high mental
functioning and apparent high understanding in animals such as
crows, who have no cortex and tiny brains.

Human
memory is still supremely mysterious, and we have no understanding
of how brains could be achieving the 50-year memories that humans
demonstrate, or the instantaneous recall of memories that humans
have. Despite the dogma that memories are stored in brains, there is no plausible neural explanation as to how an organic system like the
brain could be the source of memory storage as long-lasting as
humans have, or the source of memory recall as instantaneous as
humans have.

All
of these things suggest an idea much more logical than the “we are
thinking meat” dogma of materialists: the idea that we are thinking
souls who happen to be hanging around in bodies. Because this idea
is highly viable, we do not at all know that understanding is
something that is materially produced by human brains. Not knowing
such a thing, we can have no confidence that some “trick of matter
producing mind” will ever be uncovered by future scientists.

If
you are “thinking meat,” then you might have a grave fear that
maybe the secret of a “meat-to-mind” trick might be learned by
computer makers, who might be able to amp up such a trick a
thousand-fold, to produce robots and computers so smart that they
take over all jobs such as yours, or take over the world. But in
light of the eight things discussed above, a more logical idea is:
there is no such “meat-to-mind” trick for us to ever discover,
because the meat in our brains is not producing our minds. In that
case, we need not fear very much robots or computers, because they
simply will never be able to have any bit of the understanding we
have. Computers or robots lacking any real understanding will not be
able to perform any of the more intellectually demanding jobs, those
that require real conceptual understanding. And such robots and
computers will not be able to take over the world, having no actual
understanding of our planet or even a thousand simpler things.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

Earlier
this year, Scientific American published a blistering critique
of the theory of cosmic inflation originally advanced by Alan Guth
(not to be confused with the more general Big Bang theory). The
theory of cosmic inflation (which arose in 1980) is a kind of baroque
add-on to the Big Bang theory that arose decades earlier. The Big
Bang theory asserts the very general idea that the universe began
suddenly in a state of incredible density, perhaps the infinite
density called a singularity; and that the universe has been
expanding ever since. The cosmic inflation theory makes a claim
about less than one second of this expansion – that during only the
first second of the expansion, there was a special super-fast type of
expansion called exponential expansion.

The
article in Scientific American criticizing the theory of
cosmic inflation was by three scientists (Anna Ijjas, Paul J.
Steinhardt, Abraham Loeb), one a Harvard professor and another a
Princeton professor. It was filled with very good points that should
be read by anyone curious about the claims of the cosmic inflation
theory. But now the article has been half-censored, for Scientific
American has put the article behind a paywall. But don't worry,
you can still read the article on a Harvard web site here. Or you
can go to this site by the article's authors, summarizing their
critique of the cosmic inflation theory.

The
Scientific
American
article by the three scientists provoked an unusual response. The
main supporters of cosmic inflation theory (including Alan Guth and
Andrei Linde) along with about 30 other cosmologists have published a
rebuttal article
called “A Cosmic Controversy.” It is kind of an authoritarian
power play, designed to impress the reader by listing authorship by
some of the top names in cosmology. The list of authors is very
impressive, but there are some factually inaccurate claims in the
article.

The
article claims that the cosmic inflation theory has been empirically
successful. Referring to variations of the theory called slow-roll
models, Guth claims that “many models in this class continue to be
very successful empirically,” and later refers to “the dramatic
observational successes of inflation.” These claims are not
accurate.

The
cosmic inflation theory makes two main claims: (1) that there is or
was something called an inflaton field; (2) that the universe
underwent a period of exponential expansion during part of its first
second. Various versions of the cosmic inflation theory have also
claimed that there exist or once existed other universes (sometimes
called “bubble universes”), or that something called grand
unification theories (GUT theories) are in some sense correct. We
have not a single observation verifying any of these claims.

The
claim that the universe underwent an exponential expansion during
part of its first second is one that can never be confirmed, because of
physical limitations (the recombination era issue) that will always
prevent us from looking back to the universe’s first second with
our telescopes. No evidence has been produced for this so-called
inflaton field, and it has not been detected by the Large Hadron
Collider. No evidence has been produced that there is any universe
other than our own, and there are very strong reasons for thinking
that no such evidence ever could be produced (anything that we might
observe would always be an observation of our universe, not some
other universe). No evidence has turned up for the idea of grand
unification theories (GUTs), which have been one of the more
embarrassing failures of modern physics.

Given
this situation, in which not a single one of its key claims has been
backed up by observations, it is pure baloney for Guth and
his allies to be calling their theory an empirical success. Their
claim is based on the very shaky idea that various versions of cosmic
inflation theory have made some predictions about a few
things that have been consistent with observed reality. In my post
here I give several paragraphs explaining why this type of claiming
success based on imprecise general predictions is fallacious. Among
the reasons I gave is that there are very many versions of the cosmic
inflation theory (each predicting a wide range of things, as each
version allows a range of input parameters); so even if the theory is
bunk we should not be surprised if some of the resulting predictions
matched reality.

Let
us suppose that some theory claimed that green monsters from Alpha
Centauri have landed on our planet and invested in the bond market;
consequently next year the bond market will go up and the stock
market will go down. If next year the bond market did go up and the
stock market did go down, it would still not at all be accurate to
claim that this weird theory was empirically successful. It would
only be correct to say that if the green monsters were actually
observed. Similarly, no theory of cosmic inflation can be called
empirically successful until one of its core central claims (unique
to the theory) has been observed. No such thing has happened.

There
is another huge reason why the cosmic inflation theory cannot be
called empirically successful. The reason is that the theory is
inconsistent with observations of anomalies in the cosmic background
radiation (also called the cosmic microwave background, or CMB).

Believed
to date from early in the universe, the cosmic background radiation
is a type of radiation pervading all of space. The cosmic inflation
theory predicts that this radiation should be very smooth and
isotropic (just as the theory that your friend spent 20 minutes
stirring his bowl of pancake batter predicts that the pancake batter
should be very smooth, and without lumps).

The
first satellite to observe in detail the cosmic background radiation
was the WMAP satellite launched in 2001. This satellite detected some
very strange anomalies in the cosmic background radiation, anomalies
that came as a surprise to scientists. One was an anomaly called the
cosmic cold spot. Another was an anomaly that is technically known
as the hemispherical variance asymmetry. Then there is an anomaly
called the quadrupole-octopole alignment. There are nine other
anomalies in the cosmic background radiation that are summarized in a
table in this scientific paper. The table is below:

The
p-values here give us a rough idea of the probability of finding such
anomalies if standard ideas of cosmology (including cosmic inflation
and dark matter) are correct. This all presents a huge problem for
cosmic inflation theorists such as Guth. These are all things that
we should not expect to be finding in the cosmic background radiation
if the cosmic inflation theory is correct.

Years
after the WMAP satellite was launched, scientists launched another
satellite called the Planck satellite. It was predicted that the
troubling anomalies in the cosmic background radiation would go away
after the more powerful Planck satellite did its work. But that did
not happen. The Planck team reported the same anomalies. The table
above is from a paper entitled, “CMB Anomalies After Planck.”
When the Planck team reported its results on these anomalies, they
buried their findings in a dense technical document, as if they were
trying to make it as hard as possible for anyone to discover the
truth about this matter. But the “CMB Anomalies After Planck”
paper gives us some of the straight talk that the Planck paper
lacked.

Referring
to the hemispherical asymmetry it reported, the paper says, “An
inflationary theory could, in principle, accommodate models that
produce hemispherical asymmetry, but such a model would have to be
multi-field and involve, for example, a large-amplitude superhorizon
perturbation to the curvaton field.” Which is a fancy say of
saying the simpler versions of the cosmic inflation theory are not compatible
with this CMB anomaly – only more baroque and implausible versions
are compatible with it. Requiring a multi-field cosmic
inflation theory (imagining not just one but more than one
undiscovered fundamental field involved in primordial cosmic
inflation) is kind of like it being that your theory of crop circles requires not just UFO's but also cooperation by Bigfoot creatures. In a similar vein, this paper states that the most popular version of the
cosmic inflation theory (called slow-roll inflation) is not
compatible with the CMB anomalies:

Measurements
of CMB temperature fluctuations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy
Probe (WMAP) indicate that the fluctuation amplitude in one half of
the sky differs from the amplitude in the other half. We show that
such an asymmetry cannot be generated during single-field slow-roll
inflation without violating constraints to the homogeneity of the
Universe.

But
this “slow-roll” version of the inflation theory is the very one
that Guth called “very successful empirically” in his Scientific
American article. Apparently it is no such thing.

A
2010 paper states the following about the anomalies in the cosmic
background radiation:

While
not all of these alignments are statistically independent, their
combined statistical significance is certainly greater than their
individual significances. For example,
given their mutual alignments, the conditional probability of the
four normals lying so close to the ecliptic, is less than 2%; the
combined probability of the four normals
being both so aligned with each other and so close to the ecliptic is
less than 0.4% × 2% = 0.008%. These are therefore clearly
surprising, highly statistically significant
anomalies — unexpected in the standard inflationary theory and the
accepted cosmological model.

This
is a probability of less than 1 in 10,000 under the assumptions of
the cosmic inflation theory and the accepted cosmological model.
That's hardly what we would find if the cosmic inflation theory
really was “empirically successful” as Guth claims.

Using
the phrase “in tension” to mean “conflict with,” Stephon H.
Alexander (a professor of physics at Brown University) writes the
following about these anomalies in the cosmic background radiation,
and their relation to the cosmic inflation theory:

During the
epoch that the CMB anisotropies were formed, they too are supposed
to, on average look the same in every direction. The theory of cosmic
inflation generically predicts this feature. This means that if one
divides the sky into two arbitrary hemispheres, we should see the
same statistical features of the anisotropies in both hemispheres.
However, both WMAP and Planck see a difference in the amount of
anisotropies in different hemispheres in the sky. This feature is in
tension [with] one of the most powerful attributes of inflation,
whose rapid expansion of space-time smooths out any large-scale
directional preference, while democratically sprinkling the
space-time fabric with the same amount of ripples in every direction.
With some decorative tweaking, it is possible to modify inflation to
account for the anomaly, but this seems to be at odds with what
inflation was invented for-to make the early universe smooth enough
and see the tiny anisotropies that later become galaxies. One might
think that this would be a great opportunity for alternative theories
of the early universe, such as bouncing/cyclic cosmologies to rise to
the occasion and explain the anomalies, but so far, there is no
compelling alternative.

By
suggesting that it may be time for “alternative theories of the
early universe,” Alexander is clearly suggesting these CMB
anomalies are in conflict with the cosmic inflation theory.

Contrary
to the claims of Guth and his clique, the cosmic inflation theory is not empirically
successful. It has enjoyed another type of success: sociological
success. The history of modern science culture shows repeatedly that
a theory that is not empirically successful may become sociologically
successful and become popular due to a bandwagon effect and
groupthink. Once this snowball effect gets rolling, the theory may become a speech custom of an insular academic subculture,
and a little piece of tribal folklore has been born. The adherents
of the theory will in effect place gold medals around their own
necks, congratulating themselves on what they think is their
brilliant explanatory triumph. But such gold medals may be very
undeserved.

But
why did I use the term “shocking” in this blog post's title to refer
to these anomalies in the cosmic background radiation? There's one
CMB anomaly that is quite shocking. It seems that something called
the quadrupole – octopole alignment aligns with the plane of our
solar system. Since the cosmic background radiation has often been
described as something that looks the same everywhere in the
universe, we should not expect to find any such correlation involving
our solar system. One paper states the following:

Particularly
puzzling are the alignments with solar system features. CMB
anisotropy should clearly not be correlated with our local habitat.
While the observed correlations
seem to hint that there is contamination by a foreground or perhaps
by the scanning strategy of the telescope, closer inspection reveals
that there is no obvious way to explain the observed correlations.

But when you look at CMB map, you also see that the structure that is
observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the
earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That's
crazy. We're looking out at the whole universe. There's no way there
should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around
the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That
would say we are truly the center of the universe.
The new results are either telling us that all of science is wrong
and we're the center of the universe, or maybe the data is simply
incorrect, or maybe it's telling us there's something weird about the
microwave background results and that maybe, maybe there's something
wrong with our theories on the larger scales.

There is a small band of
cosmology-following geocentrists who believe that the Earth is the
center of the universe, and that this quadrupole – octopole
alignment supports their claim. But we know the earth revolves
around the sun. A less outrageous claim would be that the solar
system may be somehow in some kind of privileged position, and that
the quadrupole – octopole alignment supports this claim. It would
be premature to make even this less outrageous claim based on this
limited evidence. But it is interesting that this quadrupole –
octopole alignment may suggest one of the key assumptions of modern
cosmology (the Copernican principle, that there is nothing special
about the position of the solar system) may be wrong.

Postscript: For more information on this topic, do a Google search for "lopsided universe," "axis of evil (cosmology)", "CMB cold spot," and "CMB anomalies." In a previous post I had mentioned the cold spot as a thorn in the side of cosmic inflation theory, but from the table above it is clear that the hemispherical variance asymmetry is a ten times bigger problem for that theory.

Wednesday, August 9, 2017

One
of the standard plays of those who refuse to accept observations of
the paranormal involves assuming a sanctimonious “holier-than-thou”
attitude in regard to rationality. The skeptic will imply that he and
his ideological allies are rational thinkers, and that those who
believe otherwise are irrational. A lame example of this strategy is
to be found in a long essay recently published in The Atlantic.
The essay by Kurt Andersen is called “How America Lost Its Mind.”
The approach Andersen takes is to go throughout the past 60 years of
American history, and belittle a huge variety of observations,
theories or thought tendencies that he dislikes. He tries to trash
all such things by claiming that they were irrational, part of a
process of America losing its mind. The resulting critique,
involving a great deal of unfairness and poor logic, is a kind of
toxic soup that is served up in a cup marked “100% rational.”

Andersen
disparages the counterculture of the 1960's, trying to portray it as
some outburst of irrationality and reality-denial. This is quite
unhistorical. The hippie-movement or counterculture of the 1960's
largely arose as a reaction to the sins of 1960's America, which
included racial discrimination, conformist consumerism, and the
waging of a senseless war abroad in Vietnam in which more than
300,000 died or were maimed by bombs dropped by American bombers and
toxic Agent Orange sprayed by American personnel. Reacting against
such things was more like rationality and paying attention to reality than
the opposite.

Two
of the visuals of Andersen's article show peace signs and an “End
the War” sign among various other portrayals supposed to show
irrational Americans. Andersen says, “As the Vietnam War escalated
and careened, antirationalism flowered,” and then in the next
sentence he discusses a Vietnam war protest described by Mailer. The
net result is we are left with the insinuation that opposing
one of America's most senseless wars was an act of irrationality. But it was
actually the opposite of that.

1960's: a rational response to an irrational war

Andersen
then attempts to make a list of various things that he thinks are
examples of America “losing its mind” and becoming “untethered
from reality.” Among the things he lists are Raymond Moody's book
describing near-death experiences, and Charles Tart's research on
out-of-body experiences. But what are these things doing in such a
list? Both near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences are
occasional parts of human experience, whatever their cause.
Documenting such experiences is an example of paying attention to
reality, not becoming untethered from it. Andersen gives us a bogus
claim that Charles Tart “proceeded to devote his
academic career to proving that attempts at objectivity are a sham
and magic is real.” To the contrary, Tart is a very serious
scientific researcher who has written many level-headed books dealing
with parapsychology research. I've read several of his books, and
they never presented any belief about magic. You can see Tart's
recent blog postings here, and you will find no sign of Andersen's
cheap-shot depiction being correct.

Andersen
then goes on to include UFO observers in his mudslinging, by saying,
“I’m pretty certain that the unprecedented surge of UFO reports
in the ’70s was not evidence of extraterrestrials’ increasing
presence but a symptom of Americans’ credulity and magical thinking
suddenly unloosed.” But there's no “magical thinking” in a
typical UFO sighting – a person simply reports some strange thing
he saw. Absurdly, Andersen tries to suggest that maybe we should have
denied Jimmy Carter the presidency because he saw a UFO. He states,
“Until we’d passed through the ’60s and half of the ’70s, I’m
pretty sure we wouldn’t have given the presidency to some dude,
especially a born-again Christian, who said he’d recently seen a
huge, color-shifting, luminescent UFO hovering near him.” Carter's
sighting (which actually occurred 7 years before he became president) was witnessed by other people. There's nothing irrational
about reporting what you and other witnesses have seen, nor is it
irrational to report what you alone have seen. Andersen's type of
“shaming the witnesses” talk is deplorable, the type of talk
engaged by those who wish to be shielded from some aspect of reality
they find disturbing.

Andersen
scorns those who have suspicions about evolution dogmas, but also
scorns those who believe in UFO's or ancient astronauts. What sense
does that make? If Darwinian assumptions are correct, we might
expect that there should be life on many of the billions of planets
in our galaxy. In that case we might well expect to have had
extraterrestrial visitors who visited in the past or are visiting
now. We may note the very arbitrary selectiveness of what Andersen
deems to be irrational. Why is the ancient astronauts thesis
advanced by von Daniken irrational, when the same idea was suggested
in print earlier by distinguished astronomer Carl Sagan, a hero of
people who call themselves rationalists?

After
engaging in many an unfair characterization, Andersen then goes on to
try to link these supposed examples of irrationality with the
baffling election of Donald Trump, using a kind of logic insinuating
that the election of 2016 was the result of seeds planted in the
1960's and 1970's. His reasoning is not convincing. When judging
claims that event X helped to cause event Y, we should always look at
the time between the two events. The longer the time between the
events, the less likely the two are to be causally related. In this
case there is some 50 years between the hippies of the 1960's and the
election of 2016. Any attempt to suggest the first “planted the seeds”
of the second is not believable. The “money isn't very important”
hippies of the 1960's criticized the “creature comfort goals” of
the moneyed establishment (to quote a phrase from a 1960's song), and
would not likely have approved of Trump's election.

The fact that Trump did not actually win the popular vote, and lost by nearly 3 million votes, is a fact inconsistent with Andersen's thesis suggesting Trump's election is a sign that America has lost its mind. You could just as easily argue the popular vote totals were a sign of America's good judgment.

A
close examination of the dogmas held by "holier-than-thou" rationalists
will show that these supposed rationalists are often people throwing
rocks from inside glass houses, because such thinkers are often
guilty of believing things every bit as irrational – or even more
irrational – than many of the beliefs they call irrational. Such an
examination will be found in past and future posts on this blog.

Saturday, August 5, 2017

As I described in this post, there is a pattern I
observe repeatedly in science reporting:

A scientific paper
will be released making modest claims that may not be particularly
interesting.

That paper will be
hyped and exaggerated by a press release published by some
institution related to the scientific paper, perhaps a particular
university or scientific group.

Further hype and
exaggeration will be done by the popular press, which is always
eager to sensationalize the scientific, because of the Internet
profit that results from an increased number of users clicking on a
click-bait link.

By the time the average
person reads the story prompted by the scientific paper, they will be
given some idea that may not at all be justified by the original
paper.

I saw such a thing going
on in a recent announcement of a new map called a “dark matter
map.” When I saw the story announcing this on bbc.com, I was quite
surprised. The bbc.com story announced, “Researchers have released
the most accurate map ever produced of the dark matter in our
Universe.” But how can someone have a map of dark matter locations
when dark matter has never been observed? All attempts thus far to
make direct observations of dark matter have failed. Dark matter doesn't even have a place in the Standard Model of Physics, and no evidence for it has turned up at the Large Hadron Collider.

I began examining the
sources of these claims. The BBC story took me to the the web site of
something called the Dark Energy Survey. On that site was a press release issued by Fermilab, a major scientific organization. The
press release was entitled, “Dark Energy Survey reveals most
accurate measurement of dark matter structure in the universe.”
That is pretty much the same as claiming to have a map of dark matter
in the universe. The Fermilab press release claimed that scientists
had “precisely measured the shapes of 26 million galaxies to
directly map the patterns of dark matter over billions of
light-years, using a technique called gravitational lensing.” It
then gave a link back to the Dark Energy Survey page and some papers
released on that page.

This sounded very fishy to
me, because observations of gravitational lensing are not equivalent
to observations of dark matter. Gravitational lensing is a strange
effect produced on light rays bent by the gravity of high
concentrations of matter. Such matter can be any type of matter:
either normal matter or possibly some type of dark matter. As Scientific American puts it when describing gravitational lensing:

According to Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, mass warps
space, so a large amount of matter in the foreground of a galaxy can
bend its light in a way that makes it look slightly squashed. This is
true whether the foreground mass is made of invisible dark matter or
ordinary matter.So if you
are claiming to have a map of dark matter made by observing
gravitational lensing, you are doing something rather like announcing
that you have a map of UFO landing sites made by observing small
burnt patches in the forest. Such patches might be produced by hot
UFO's that are landing, but they also might be produced by ordinary
lightning flashes.

What I also thought was
fishy was that the Fermilab press release gave us a visual which it
tells us is a map of dark matter. But the map legend on that visual
does not refer to dark matter, but is instead labeled “Density of
matter.” The map is below:

To further investigate
whether both the BBC and Fermilab are guilty of exaggeration or hype
or dubious interpretations, I tracked down the scientific paper that
is the source of these claims. The paper is here. It is entitled
“Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Curved-sky Weak Lensing Mass
Map.” This paper has the same visual that appears in the Fermilab
story and the BBC story, so it seems to be the source of their
stories.

I read the abstract of the
paper. There was no mention made of dark matter. I tried searching
for “dark matter” in the text. The only two mentions of dark
matter were incidental mentions not claiming to have observed or
mapped dark matter. The first mention was this:

Simulations?
That's “make believe” stuff,
not an observation of dark matter or a mapping of dark matter.

The
second and last mention of dark matter in the scientific paper was
the following turgid prose:

Galaxies
are assigned to dark matter particles and given rband absolute
magnitudes based on the distribution p(d|Mr) measured from a high
resolution simulation populated with galaxies using subhalo abundance
matching (SHAM) (Conroy, Wechsler

This
is not a statement making any claim about dark matter. The
scientific paper makes no claim at all to have mapped or observed
dark matter. It only claims to have observed gravitational lensing
and made a map of “mass distribution,” which could be any type of
matter, either regular matter or dark matter. The paper did have
several visuals like the visual in the Fermilab press release (which
calls the visual a map of dark matter). But in the scientific paper
none of those visuals was described as a map of dark matter.

Rather
than claiming to be making a map of dark matter, the paper claims to
be creating a map of the “mass distribution of the universe,” a
more general term referring to any type of matter, either regular or
dark matter. The paper states in its first sentence:“One
way to map the mass distribution of the Universe is by using
the technique of weak gravitational lensing.” Then in its
conclusion the paper states the following:

Weak
lensing allows us to probe the total mass distribution in the
Universe. One of the most intuitive ways to visualize and comprehend
this information is through weak lensing convergence maps,or mass
maps....In this paper, we construct weak lensing mass maps for the
first year of Dark Energy Survey data (DES Y1) using two independent
shear catalogs. METACALIBRATION and IM3SHAPE, in the redshift range
0.2 < z < 1.3 and in the region overlapping with the South Pole
Telescope footprint.

This
is exactly how a paper would speak if it were presenting a map of the
mass distribution of the universe (its total matter that is either
regular matter or dark matter), not specifically a map of dark
matter.

What
we have going on here by bbc.com and Fermilab seems to be shameless
hype and exaggeration, which includes the inaccurate claim that a map
has been made of dark matter. The bbc.com and Fermilab press coverage
refers us to the Dark Energy Survey. But when the relevant scientific
paper is tracked down from the site of the Dark Energy Survey, we
find that the paper did not actually make any substantive claim at
all about dark matter, referring to it only in two passing
references. The paper does not claim to have presented a map of dark
matter, but merely claims to have made maps of mass distribution (a
term that means the total amount of any type of matter, whether dark
or regular). A Scientific American article describes the research correctly, saying it is a finding about "the distribution of matter," and making no claim that it involves any type of map of dark matter.

Described by those who believe in it as something "invisible," dark
matter has never been observed, and you cannot make a map of
something that has never been observed. The map these stories
referred to is a map of mass distribution, not specifically dark
matter. But, of course, if you describe such a map as a map of dark
matter, that will result in more web traffic, because it sounds like
something new and exciting (scientists have been making mass
distribution maps for decades).

A
lesson we may draw from this episode is perhaps that exaggeration and misinterpretation of scientific papers is not
something done only by more sensationalistic sites like DailyGalaxy.com; it is also something that can be done by the
most mainstream and respected science-reporting sites such as the BBC site and the Fermilab site.

Copyright Notice

All posts on this blog are authored by Mark Mahin, and are protected by copyright. Copyright 2013-2014 by Mark Mahin. All rights reserved. Any resemblance between any fictional character and any real person is purely coincidental.